White Guilt (2 page)

The answer begins in the matter of fidelity. In a democracy the legitimacy of institutions and of government itself is earned and sustained through
fidelity
to a discipline of democratic principles. These principles strive to ensure the ennobling conditions that free societies aspire to: freedom for the individual, the same rights for all individuals, equality under the law, equality of opportunity, and an inherent right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Freedom, then, is not a state-imposed vision of the social good (say, a classless society); rather, it is the absence of any imposed vision that would infringe on the rights and freedom of individuals. In a true democracy freedom is a higher priority than the social good.

So freedom is what
follows
from a discipline of principles—equal treatment under the law, one man one vote, freedom of speech, separation of church and state, the litany of individual rights, and so on. Both citizens and the government (which exists only by the “consent of the governed”) are enjoined to practice
this discipline even when it requires great sacrifice. Thus, fidelity to a discipline of principles—rather than to notions of the social or public “good”—is the unending struggle of democracies. And the legitimacy of democratic governments and institutions depends on the quality of this struggle.

In totalitarian or feudal societies legitimacy and moral authority are, a priori, coming from God (the divine right of kings) or from ideological “truth.” Fidelity is not to a discipline of principles but to the grand vision at the center of the ideology or to the king. Free societies become more like these unfree societies when they decide that some social good is so important that it justifies suspending freedom's discipline of principles.

The most tragic American example of such a “social good” is white supremacy. For centuries white Americans presumed that white supremacy was a self-evident divine right, so freedom's discipline of principles did not apply where nonwhites were concerned. But over time this lapse of democratic discipline undermined the moral authority (interchangeable here with legitimacy) of the American democracy and its institutions. The civil rights movement
disciplined
America with democratic principles, establishing the point that one's race could not mitigate one's rights as an individual. In democracies true moral authority is always man's responsibility rather than God's, and it can only be
earned
through fidelity to principle.

When I was eleven or twelve years old and crazy for baseball, I wanted to be the batboy for the local YMCA team. I wanted this so badly that I paid no mind to the fact that the team was all white. In the black suburb where I lived there was no organized baseball, only pickup games in scruffy vacant lots that flooded in the spring and turned to dust in July. The Y team played on a real baseball diamond with cut grass, a raked dirt infield, dugouts, and bleachers all around. The players were five or six years older than I and almost at the semipro level. They drove cars, had sideburns and girlfriends. Best of all, they played hardball and stood in there against the fastest pitching an eighteen-year-old arm could deliver. You knew it was fast because little puffs of dust would ascend from the catcher's mitt when a fastball was swung at and missed. It wasn't complicated. I had sort of dreamed my way into their world, and becoming the team batboy was the best way I knew to hold on.

My manner of application for the job was simply to hang
around. The coach avoided me for a long time, and I knew it was because I was black and that this was not an opportunity open to black kids. But I had no white competitors, so the more he avoided me, the more ubiquitous I became. I was at the age when wanting something very badly involves as much denial as longing. I knew about segregation and knew, on some level, that I was heading into a brick wall. But between the flowering of my dream and that brick wall, denying what I knew only too well allowed me to enjoy the sweetness of aspiration itself.

Things turned my way one day when I picked up a couple stray bats and handed them to the coach. I had done a hundred little jobs like this to make myself the solution to his stoop-labor problem, but on this day I finally saw a look of resignation in his eyes. He shook his head as if to wonder at his own helplessness, and then he began to give me orders. The orders meant I was hired, and I was exhilarated. I learned every player's bat, and at home games I quickly mastered the batboy's art of speed and unobtrusiveness. I could retrieve the newly dropped bat after a play, get it back into the dugout bat rack under the right name, and get the next man on deck his bat in one unbroken circle of movement. After games and practices I pounded the dust out of the bases, packed them in the coach's trunk, bucketed loose balls, bagged the catcher's equipment, and last, made sure the field and dugouts were completely denuded of team equipment. For all this I received absolutely nothing, though I hoped for a team cap that would finally force my snickering friends to see that I really was team batboy.

This was not to be. On the Saturday morning of our first away game I arrived at the Y early to load up the bus we were
taking to a famous semipro ball field in South Chicago. The players were excited and playful when they arrived, and I looked forward to this first bus ride with the team.

It was when I was pushing the last few bags into the bus's hold that I noticed that the entire bus had gone silent. When I looked up, I saw eyes in every window, and they were all trained on me. I knew instantly that I had come to the brick wall that had been waiting for me all along. What an effort it had taken not to acknowledge it, as if all by myself I was going to will evil out of the world. But here it was finally, almost welcome for the relief it brought.

Still, there had been a great momentum in this entire effort to become a batboy, and that momentum—a kind of good faith—would not let me stop just because reality was finally showing itself. So I stood aside as the bus driver locked the hold, and then I walked straight to the bus's door. But the coach was already descending the boarding steps as I got there. He paused for a second to meet me with his eyes, and then he stepped down to the sidewalk and put a huge hand on my shoulder.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “But they don't allow coloreds in the park we're going to. And that's the way it's going to be for all the away games. I can't use you anymore.”

The same momentum that had led me to offer myself up in this way made me start to resist, to say something, to beg or protest or both. But then it was as though my very insides dropped out and I was utterly hollow. No words ever came. He patted my shoulder, then climbed back into the bus. I wanted to cry, felt all the precursors for a collapse into tears, but I did not cry, and I never cried. Encircled by all those eyes, I turned
around and walked back into the YMCA. I will never forget the sanctuary of the huge revolving door at the front of the Y, nor the words that I said to myself as I passed through it: “This really happened, didn't it. And it's really bad.”

 

Segregation was, of course, an institutionalized infidelity to democratic principles. But to say this is only to state a fact. Incidents like this gave this fact an emotional history. Through them the societal infidelity marked the human being—and here it marked the coach and all the players as well as myself. Back then I would have denied
any
mark. Who is tougher than a twelve-year-old boy? And even today I am certain that racist rejections like this do not cause low self-esteem in their victims. They cause disenchantment with the world. My self-esteem was not diminished in the least by what happened to me on that Saturday morning. That is not how injustice is absorbed. That morning I had had what I would much later understand to be an existential experience. This had been an encounter with the absurd, and the world was simply no longer as firm for me as it had been. So my loss of faith was not in myself; it was in the world. Ironically, this put me a little above the world and gave my own judgments a new authority. I did not become a Nietzschean superman, free to define the world on my own terms. But a new voice, and a new will, opened within me. If anything, this experience was a passage to higher self-esteem.

 

Ten years later, in early June of 1968, I was sitting with my parents in a hotel room in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, watching my mother across the room silently crying. I was to graduate from
college that weekend, and my parents had driven up from Chicago for the ceremony. While they slept that first night—and while I embarked on a weekend-long graduation party—Robert Kennedy was shot and killed in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Greeted with this news at breakfast, my parents—especially my mother—were as shattered as I had ever seen them by a public event. My mother was a strong, even commanding, woman, and I had seen her cry no more than a few times in my entire life.

And probably what happened next was triggered precisely by the fact that tears were so uncharacteristic of her. But the mere sight of her sitting by the hotel window, eyes wet over the assassination of Robert Kennedy, sent me into a paroxysm of rage. She had said quite clearly what saddened her. And it had nothing to do with any silly feeling for the Kennedy mystique. She had never particularly liked or trusted any of the Kennedys. She was sad, she said, because Bobby Kennedy's assassination, coming on the heels of Martin Luther King's assassination, meant that history had lost a chance. She kept repeating that history had lost a chance. But the idea that racial overcoming had come to depend on the presidential bid of this arrogant little Kennedy sent me over the top. I had by then come into a new, uncompromising idea of what it meant to be black. Blackness had suddenly become that year—well before even King's assassination—more and more defined as a will to power, as an imperative by masters rather than a plea by slaves. So it was slavish to think that black advancement was somehow dependent on the good offices of a white man without half the gravitas of black leaders like King or James Farmer or Malcolm X. Thus,
for twenty minutes I berated the newly assassinated candidate with more fury than I might have mustered for George Wallace, who—it was vogue to say—was at least an honest bigot.

The fact is that we live different lives than our parents, no matter how much we love them and they us. We have a separate experience to contend with. My parents were classic civil rights people. I had grown up watching them struggle against an unapologetically racist America. In their generation protest had to be persuasion, since they were vastly outnumbered in a society that took white supremacy as self-evident truth. Like most people in the King-era civil rights movement, they were Gandhians because nonviolent passive resistance was the best way to highlight white racism as an immorality. Their rejection of violence, even as a weapon against racial oppression, gave them the extraordinary power of moral witness—the great power of the early civil rights movement. What could America think of itself when passive freedom riders were beaten or when a little black girl in crinoline and pigtails—an image of perfectly conventional human aspiration—had to be escorted into school past a screaming white mob?

This kind of moral witness transformed America forever, and its very success meant that it had, in fact,
persuaded
America. But what do all the postures of Gandhian passive resistance look like when the enemy has been persuaded? Suddenly the nonviolence that looked courageous in the face of the mob looks a little obeisant and supplicating when the mob disappears, when the government itself passes laws ending the segregated way of life the mob stood for. My parents believed with all their hearts in the moral power of turning the other cheek, but by
1968 this strategy was passé and Dr. King himself was a bit of an anachronism.

My generation had a new and different mandate. Our job was not to persuade; it was to replace passivism with militancy.

 

A few weeks before my parents arrived for graduation, I had led the black students on my campus into our college president's office unannounced with our generation's favorite instrument of confrontation: a list of demands. As I read these demands to the president, with all the militant authority I could muster, I allowed the ashes from my lit cigarette to fall in little gray cylinders onto the president's plush carpet. This was the effrontery, the insolence, that was expected in our new commitment to militancy. But it had not been preplanned.

I had unthinkingly lit a cigarette—a Kool, the black brand of the day—just as our march reached the administration building. As we wound our way through the building up to the president's office, I had looked for ashtrays—the bourgeois in me insisting on propriety—but found none. And as the leader of this march, I could hardly wander off to find one. So I kept moving up the stairs, right past the president's startled secretary, and into the inner sanctum of his office, lit cigarette in hand.

And once face-to-face with the president—thirty or so black students crowding into the office behind me—I had an epiphany: I should not worry about putting the cigarette out. It was exactly the gesture I was looking for. Its stinking, roiling smoke and its detritus of ash made the point that we were a new black generation operating under a new historical mandate. No more long-suffering, “go-limp” passivism. The bourgeois Martin
Luther King would never deign to smoke at such a moment, if at all, which was exactly why I had to. Our point was that black power would no longer come from being better than whites; it would come from
not
being better.

My parents heard about all this from other parents when they arrived. They broached the subject with me in a tone of grave disappointment. My cigarette had given away the high ground, they said, and invalidated the protest. It was all Kingism, the civil rights credo, the beauty and power of passivism. They spoke as if my entire youth had not been an instruction in the manipulation of moral power.

It was the next morning that I went to their room hoping to say something reasonable about the position my generation was in. But the sight of my mother crying over Bobby Kennedy brought an end to reason, and suddenly I was filled with the same militancy and outrage that had prompted the cigarette ploy in the president's office. And at the heart of this anger was an empowering feeling of license—the feeling that being black released me from the usual obligation to common decency and decorum. I was perfectly justified in spilling cigarette ashes on a beautiful carpet and in disdaining Bobby Kennedy. I was licensed to live in a spirit of disregard toward my own country.

Where did this kind of black anger come from?

Conventional wisdom, as well as black protest writing, suggests that it comes from the wound of oppression and that it is essentially an outrage against injustice. My humiliating rejection at the hands of the YMCA baseball coach, even for the lowly position of batboy, would perfectly illustrate the conventional understanding of how people are psychically wounded and made
angry by oppression. The theory is that each such wound fires more and more anger and alienation in the soul of the oppressed until there is an inevitable explosion. In Richard Wright's protest novels,
Native Son
and
The Outsider,
there is a clear determinism between the wounds inflicted by a racist society and the deadly outbursts of violence in which his black protagonists murder whites. Against the backdrop of wounding oppression, murder is shown to be a futile and pathetic attempt to control one's fate and, thereby, to reclaim one's humanity.

But, in fact, I did not work myself up for either of these displays of “black anger” with memories of my racial mortifications. My batboy debacle, and all the other indignities and deprivations of a segregated childhood, never crossed my mind as I prepared to confront my college president. There is no determinism between one's racial wounds and the acting out of black rage—a phrase that came into use only
after
the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. Oppression, in itself, pushes people neither to anger nor to revolution. If it did, black slaves would have been so relentlessly rebellious that slavery would have been unsustainable as an institution. It is wishful thinking in those who rightly abhor oppression to see it as a kind of dialectic that leads automatically to the rages that eventually topple it. Slavery might never have ended had not larger America—at the price of a civil war—decided to end it. The slave's rage meant nothing and brought only the lash.